Essays in Anarchism and Religion

212 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1

masterpiece Skepsis und Mystik.^63 While being in the world im-
plies the continuous generation of new and different sense expe-
riences, reflected in language metaphors, he argued, experience
also transcends the grasp of senses and language. He identified
the Seelenhafte, the “function of the endless universe”^64 within
the individual as the locus of the universe’s self-revelation and
the individual’s non-linguistic, non-rational, mystical access to the
world, disclosing the unattainability of absolute knowledge of the
world. Through its Seelenhafte the individual is united with the
world, yet only to the extent that the individual grows to know
that it cannot know its essence. While the root of human existence
lies within the world, the world also mysteriously transcends it, so
that all reality can be experienced at once as being and beyond be-
ing.^65 This mystical access cannot be lost, but only forgotten, for
“the connection is never broken, but our superficial mind cannot
remember its origins, cannot recognise the ever-present source in
ourselves, and not allow it to flourish.”^66 Spirit then creates a new
Weltanschauung from both of these levels of experience as the
foundation for action in the world.^67
For both Landauer and Voegelin, therefore, the key to over-
coming the separation of knowing and being lies, quite simply,
in “unprecedented, intense, deep experience.”^68 According to
Landauer experience reveals that “[e]verything that appears to us
as separated, is in the reality of infinite space und infinite time
only a single, large connected whole.”^69 The feeling that humani-
ty is simply the sum of its individual components is but “human
perception as it is served by the individual organs of our senses.”^70
Nothing, least of all the individual, could be summoned under the
principle of arche. Hence, he decided that,

I leave behind the only thing that seems certain within myself; I

now float into the uncertain world of hypotheses and fantasies.

I reject the certainty of my I so that I can bear life. I try to build

myself a new world, knowing that I do not really have any ground

to build it on...Just like someone who jumps into the water to kill

himself, I jump into the world- but instead of death, I find life.^71

Instead of transforming the world “into the spirit of man, or into
the spirit of our brain,”^72 which had dragged the world down to